I have a controversial opinion about this. I was exposed to this in the beginning of my university period and at the time found it mindblowing. But now, many y

I have a controversial opinion about this. I was exposed to this in the beginning of my university period and at the time found it mindblowing. But now, many years later, do I actually regret it and wish I hadn't taken this as seriously as I did. Wishing everything I was learning was visualized, and ignoring means of teaching that weren't styled to "my type of learning" (i.e. visual) – primed by posts like this – actually prevented me from taking the effort to learn how to learn via more traditional methods, like through books. It's only now that I've realized that learning purely from visualizations (rather than being just a small aid at the end of personal sweat and effort) deprives you from reaching an end-state of utter subconscious comfort with the thing you're trying to learn. Reading and forcing yourself to parse and make sense of a book brings about a much richer, personal, and flexible understanding which is more interconnected with other things you already grok (and this is not a skill anyone is born with; though different people might have different starting positions). Visualizations are great for shared intuition, but it should only be used at the end of a long personal struggle which should involve hours upon hours of undistracted effort, preferably involving something tactile like a pen and pencil. Another problem with visualizations is that they essentially act as a certificate for "final understanding". People play with a visualization and think they understand the thing (like eigenvalues) because someone said this is what you need grok in order to understand the thing. But as any pure mathematician knows, that isn't where true learning ends. Only if you're personally convinced by a proof, without any need for external authority, should you stop making it any clearer. It can take multiple iterations of a linear algebra course to reach full enlightenment of what eigenvalues are. True understanding only comes after you've seen it from many perspectives.